Although Office 365 runs locally on your PC, laptop or tablet, free SkyDrive storage space is offered to encourage the storage of documents online. There are advantages to using cloud storage – not least that you can access your files anywhere, on any machine on which Office software is installed. (See also: Office 2013 review.)

Office 365: price

The deal on Office 365 Home Premium is more tempting than that for Office Professional 2013. Although the £80-per-year Home Premium product is restricted to non-commercial use, you can install the suite on up to five machines, PC or Mac. With Office Professional 2013, you pay £390 for a single-user perpetual licence. For more business software reviews visit Business Advisor.

Office 265: review

Office 365 Microsoft's increased emphasis on the cloud for document storage, updates and troubleshooting assumes you have a fast, reliable broadband connection. This is fine if you live and work in a city, but a decent web connection is not always a given in rural areas. Some of our testing was conducted in a rural setting using a satellite link; although this is rated at 18Gbps, it can be much slower – we witnessed noticeable pauses when moving documents to and from SkyDrive.

Microsoft is encouraging its customers to move to its subscription-based Office 365 suite by offering more flexible licence terms. You can have up to five installations of Office 365, on any combination of desktop and portable PCs or Macs. You can also move around these installations, deactivating Office 365 on one machine and activating it on another.

Until recently, a perpetual licence for a standalone version of Office could be installed on only one PC and couldn't be transferred. So, if you replaced your PC or upgraded certain parts you wouldn't be able to continue using your paid-for Office installation.

At the time of writing, Microsoft had just changed its terms in response to customer complaints. A copy of Office is now transferable once every 90 days. It's still a bit mean-spirited – if your PC is stolen you'll have to wait three months before you can legitimately install your software on a replacement machine – but it's an improvement on the previous situation.

There's also a financial incentive to subscribing to Office 365, assuming you have a use for all five installations. Office Professional 2013 and Office 365 Small Business Premium contain the same seven core Office applications, and both can be used for commercial purposes (Office 365 Home Premium cannot).

The Professional product costs £390 for a perpetual single-user licence, so you'd need five to compare on cost. Assuming a three-year cycle between Office versions, the Office 365 Small Business Premium route will cost £1,575 (£105 per person, per year), while the Professional Plus one will cost £1,950. At the end of that time, of course, you'll still have five Office 2013 Professional licences, whereas the Office 365 installations will have expired (unless you pay again to renew them). Also note that you can pay less for perpetual licences through Microsoft's Professional Plus volume-licensing scheme.

Aside from the arguments over licensing and cost, the new version of Office reveals a number of useful improvements in its core components, and minor tweaks throughout. Word's round-trip PDF editing, Excel's Quick Analysis and Flash Fill, and improvements to Presenter View in PowerPoint immediately come to mind. Improved integration with SkyDrive and the ability to use the Office apps anywhere, with documents downloaded from the cloud, is clearly the way forward when working out of the office.

These days, Office's major competition comes from free suites such as LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org and Google Docs, not commercial rivals such as WordPerfect. Although these offerings are able to offer much of the same functionality, and will cater to most people's needs, if you need to collaborate with business colleagues or clients, there's no real substitute for having Office on your machine.

Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium reviews verified by

Office remains the most comprehensive productivity suite available, and there are still things that each of its applications can do that the opposition can't. If you're working with Office documents, there's nothing more compatible than Office.

Our review of PowerPoint 2013 shows that Microsoft has improved its presentation software, but not by as much as you might think. Here's our PowerPoint 2013 review.

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Comments

EarleneBarlett said: Its good enough in fact after you install it it shows up as Office 2013 It has Word Excel Outlook I didnt want to pay a lot so I searched around and bought mine from DanArou com gift shop Activates fine works great saved me a lot

glen said: Am fed up with this generational desire to change everything If it aint broke then dont fix it Office 2003 worked a charm as did 2009 with option to save in modern mode Then some dolts decided to be on a cloud in designing a new scheme and same with Windows 8and since updating my laptop and subscribing to 365 any photos send cannot seem to resize and on emailing end up with 1M attachment not sending and hanging in box forever then message re error and to run repair 365 downloaded twice we want something goddamn reliable we want to retain our emails There is now system I can find for saving email addresses addresses disappear Is temperamental I have been involved with computers 30 years and we are on a slide Back to sending snail mail

mcowan652 said: I started on the 1 month trial about 2 hours ago and have now unistalled the lot One particular thing I wanted was to be able to create distribution lists For reasons which remains unclear and after 30 mins on the phone to the US it appears that you cannot use your contacts list from HotmailI really do not want to retype 600 contacts into another email account It seems what should be easy is not possible

bob anon said: Do not waste your time Diabolical product Forces you to change all your DNS settings and basically hijacks all your e-mails and causes fallout Ended up wasting 2 days of my life countless IT hours and it forced the shut down of my business for 3 days Still not sure it its fixed after my tech guys rebooted deleted and resetup all my employees Absolute load of crp Looks rubbish and doesnt work Similarly experienced their useless customer services to the point I just gave up typically never received the call back they promised either Not worth the pain

Trial and Error said: Its an immature product and I dont expect it to get better since Microsoft is prone to change EVERYTHING in a heartbeat Would recommend hosted Exchange only or Google Apps for business as a cloud mail solution

swati said: its better and nice article suwwacom

Puffadder said: After 10 days of really trying I have been unable to connect to my domain successfully using the instructions provided to alter the TXT or MX entries on the domain No repsonse from the email support provided by MIcrosoft to my Ticket after 5 days No telephone support availableHave no simply written off my subscription which is a shame and have to advise others to avoid this product

Greg Eisenhauer said: This is more of a warning than a comment Ive posted this elsewhere but think these pitfalls should be widely known I signed up for a small business free trial of Office 365 to see if it would work as a new Email provider I wanted to migrate the emails from a test account play with Outlook integration etc First the page required to initiate Email migration is apparently hidden from Small Business users in order to simplify the interface After posting a help request I was told by MS support that the recommended method for accessing the required Exchange Control Panel page is going to the basic Outlook page and then manually editing the URL Really Then I initiated a migration of a reasonably large users mailbox from an IMAP provider to see how ugly the migration process would be The result was an absolute disaster The migration process re-triggered every read receipt request in the Emails resulting in untold hundreds thousands of read confirmation messages for years-old Emails going out to our clients who were then Emailing us asking what was wrong Who could possibly think that a migration should result in read receipts being sent out for the transfered Emails Who thinks URL editing to get to controls is a nice UI feature I guess Microsoft This trial resulted in an embarrassment to us It should embarrass Microsoft If youre expecting competence look elsewhere

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